Difference of a million now. BBC predicting it is impossible for Remain to win. Bikkies, I'm truly sorry. I know how it feels when your country decides to jump off a cliff.

I woke up at 07:25 GMT (5hr ahead of NYC) and immediately went online.

Oh, bloody hell. Oh, sodding bollocks. Now what?

It'll take me at least 24 hours just to get a handle on this. Just my immediate thoughts follow.

Rabiner, on 23 June 2016 - 11:39 PM, said:

Can imagine Scotland wanting to vote for independence again considering they voted to remain by a pretty large margin.

Imagine? That's an inadequate word for what I'm doing. I wanted Scotland to leave the UK- to kick Cameron and Osborne's fat arses. And the Jocks had a big beef, so I said “beam me aboard, Scotty”. It would have been difficult, but we would have sorted it out eventually. What if we now have to sort out half a dozen other huge things as well?

And what's going to happen in Northern Ireland? They voted to stay. As soon as the Prime Minister triggers the Leave process under the treaty, the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic will eventually become a reality, because it will become an international land border between Britain and the EU, where passports will have to be shown. And there will be no going back. What if Sinn Fein starts saying “Even the Protestants want to stay in. They don't want a border. We never wanted a border. We always wanted a United Ireland. We still want a United Ireland”. Will the IRA start bombing on the mainland again? I remember the early seventies, when a bomb destroyed a cafe in Euston Station, to which I commuted by train every day. Nobody was killed or injured. That time.

Sunderland declared first, with a big vote for Leave. The pound immediately dropped 3% on the international markets. Plenty more horrible economic news where that came from, no doubt. Several big banks will have to move their head offices out of the UK if we leave – by law. Maybe only symbolic. But symbolism can do a lot of damage. It can kill people. You have this thing called a Confederate Flag, I'm reliably told. Something to with another thing called . . . 'alf a mo, where's me specs? . . . secession?

More on this, no doubt, as the months go by and more horrible stuff happens. I'm not a happy man. But I'm OK for the present. I'm like the Elephant's Child in the Just So Stories: a little warm, but not at all astonished.

If only we weren't run by such a bunch of dicquèdes.

Reality is a hallucination caused by alcohol deprivation.

Only Satan can rebuke sin. The righteous don't know enough.

God is not dead. He was merely voted out of office.

You can do anything with anybody if you just save them the trouble of thinking.

Well. Up at 4AM today. The news was harsh. Had a chat with my 24 year old son, and I loved his perspective- "WTF? I realize that I'm young, not a Brit, and still a bit ignorant on pros and cons. But why would UK part ways from the EU?"

Just now, he shot me this with the question "What causes people to vote against their own financial interests?"

Indeed. I can give him a thousand words on it all, but it doesn't mean diddly. I can only equate it to my US-centric bitch, which is some things are too important to leave to the electorate. I bow to my own hypocrisy.

Of course, Donald Trump- in Scotland, no less- showed up for a business promo. Called the vote a "great thing", tied it to the US elections, and well...

EDIT: The bad crazy about this visit was watching who was with Trump. Huh. Ivanka. This was business, not politics. Not that it stopped him, but Jesus...

Every woman needs a blowtorch.
---Julia Child

--- On September 17, 1787, as Benjamin Franklin was leaving the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention, at Independence Hall, in Philadelphia, a woman called out to him, saying, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”“A republic,” Franklin said, “if you can keep it.”

--- LFC, on Gorsuch ruling: "Awesome. A Christianist who swore an oath to uphold the laws of the nation and bore false witness when he did it"

What effects, good or bad, will our leaving the EU have on the USA? The only one I can think of is that you lose a convenient English-speaking friend in the Union. How bad is that for you - if at all? Are there any other bad things? Are there any good things for you?

Reality is a hallucination caused by alcohol deprivation.

Only Satan can rebuke sin. The righteous don't know enough.

God is not dead. He was merely voted out of office.

You can do anything with anybody if you just save them the trouble of thinking.

What effects, good or bad, will our leaving the EU have on the USA? The only one I can think of is that you lose a convenient English-speaking friend in the Union. How bad is that for you - if at all? Are there any other bad things? Are there any good things for you?

I doubt there will be any good for the U.S., Ireland may see companies moving from the UK into their territory.

Someone on LGM noted that the British government and many businesses now get to spend most of the next two plus years consumed by dealing with the Brexit details instead of other things they would have been working on.

Firstly, it was the working classes who voted for us to leave because they were economically disregarded, and it is they who will suffer the most in the short term. They have merely swapped one distant and unreachable elite for another.

Secondly, the younger generation has lost the right to live and work in 27 other countries. We will never know the full extent of the lost opportunities, friendships, marriages and experiences we will be denied. Freedom of movement was taken away by our parents, uncles, and grandparents in a parting blow to a generation that was already drowning in the debts of our predecessors.

Thirdly and perhaps most significantly, we now live in a post-factual democracy. When the facts met the myths they were as useless as bullets bouncing off the bodies of aliens in a HG Wells novel. When Michael Gove said, ‘The British people are sick of experts,’ he was right. But can anybody tell me the last time a prevailing culture of anti-intellectualism has led to anything other than bigotry?

"Wherever the law is, crime can be found." -- A. Solzhenitsyn

"If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first six of them sharpening my axe." -- Abraham Lincoln

"If you are the big tree, We are the small axe. Sharpened to cut you down (well sharp). Ready to cut your down." -- Bob Marley

What effects, good or bad, will our leaving the EU have on the USA? The only one I can think of is that you lose a convenient English-speaking friend in the Union. How bad is that for you - if at all? Are there any other bad things? Are there any good things for you?

Cheaper vacations in Britain?

Fear Sells!

Cui bono?

"The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology." - EO Wilson.

After residents of the UK voted today to leave the European Union, the movement for an independent Texas may be gaining serious momentum, with thousands online calling for a “Texit.”

The largest group agitating for secession is the Texas Nationalist Movement, which has been promoting its own version of Brexit, called Texit, over the past several weeks. The group has taken inspiration from the pro-exit campaign in Britain, noting that the two movements share many of the same principles.

You know, we have people who come up with more than enough homegrown stupidity without you guys going into the export business pour encourager les autres.

"Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers arc in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

— Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
1995

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

— H.L. Mencken
On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

"Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers arc in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

— Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
1995

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

— H.L. Mencken
On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

"Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers arc in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

— Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
1995

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

— H.L. Mencken
On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

What effects, good or bad, will our leaving the EU have on the USA? The only one I can think of is that you lose a convenient English-speaking friend in the Union. How bad is that for you - if at all? Are there any other bad things? Are there any good things for you?

Economic uncertainty, followed by limited ability of the fed to enact policy shifts given the current environment, followed by a major economic downturn, followed by President Trump.